Chapter 5

The house settled into a strange evening pass. The candles burned down completely, the punch bowl sat untouched, and the cake stayed under its plastic dome. Mateo wheeled himself to the living room and switched on the TV, some animated show about a fox who wanted to be an astronaut, and Aaron stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the open folder, the turned-down pages, the stack of paper Renee had been sorting when the morning was still normal.

He hadn't touched anything. He'd only read. The folder held more than the petition: a copy of the original guardianship order with both their names, a schedule of therapy appointments with a magnetic-therapy clinic in the next town over, invoices for the wheelchair maintenance and the green cushion. And a single sheet at the back, dated three months earlier, with a letterhead from a real estate attorney.

Aaron picked up the sheet. He read it twice before the words went from language to meaning.

It was a draft of a proposed sale — the family house, the one he and Mateo lived in, the one Aaron had been paying the mortgage on for seven years, out of an account that was still in his name. The draft was addressed to a title company in the next county over. The proposed seller was listed as the estate of Aaron Mercer, and the signature line was blank but the initials in the margin — the same dark, precise R.K. — had already been penciled in above the doc review note.

She wasn't trying to win a custody hearing. She was trying to close a file.

Aaron stood in the kitchen with the draft in his hand, and the afternoon rearranged itself in his head. The petition, the PO box, the hearings, the address he'd never lived at — none of it was about Mateo. The boy was a means. The guardianship was a key. And the house, the deed, the equity that had been building for seven years — that was the prize.

The co-guardianship document she'd asked him to sign seven years ago hadn't been emergency medical authorization. It made her a party to his estate decisions. It gave her the standing to sign documents about his assets in his absence, to claim she was acting in the interest of the child, to push papers through while the father was eight months and a string of international flights away.

He thought about the phone call he'd made from the airport that morning. *We're having a small thing, don't rush.* She'd said it bright, fast, a voice that knew how to sound warm. She'd had this draft in her kitchen folder for three months, and she'd planned to serve a petition tomorrow that would have removed him from Mateo's guardianship while the house sale went through under his estate.

Aaron put the draft back in the folder, flat, where he'd found it. He didn't take a picture. He didn't need to.

He walked to the living room. Mateo heard him and looked up from the fox show. "Did you find something else?"